Replacing stressful challenges with positive coping strategies: a resilience program for clinical placement learning

Area of Science:

• Health Professions Education
• Psychology
• Clinical Psychology

Background:

• Clinical education is crucial for health professionals but often causes significant student stress.
• Student anxiety and poor coping mechanisms can negatively impact learning and patient care.
• Resilience is recognized as a key factor for positive coping in academic and professional settings.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a psycho-education resilience program for health science students.
• To enhance practical, skills-based resilience capacities in physiotherapy students.
• To investigate the impact of resilience strategies on learning and clinical performance.

Main Methods:

• A psycho-education resilience program was delivered to six final-year undergraduate physiotherapy students.
• Four action research sessions incorporated resilience strategies from CBT and positive psychology.
• Thematic analysis was used to analyze student experiences and reported outcomes.

Main Results:

• Students shifted from viewing stressors as uncontrollable problems to recognizing them as expected learning challenges.
• The program facilitated the adoption of positive coping strategies.
• Reported improvements included enhanced self-efficacy, cognitive control, and self-awareness as learners.

Conclusions:

• A skills-based resilience program can effectively equip health science students to manage clinical stressors.
• Building resilience fosters self-efficacy and cognitive control, improving the learning experience.
• This approach supports the development of self-aware and competent future health practitioners.